11 mins
Self-shooting director and editor

When my mother Liz asked me to make a film about her collecting wildflowers in the City of London square mile I wanted us to talk about the history behind the plants she looks for. The 9 Herb Charm is something she has long been influenced by. It’s an Anglo Saxon poem that talks about the spiritual and healing properties of the 9 herbs, mugwort, plantain, lamb’s cress, nettle, betony, chamomile, crab-apple, thyme and fennel; plants that she searches for and still finds today in garden beds and in-between buildings.

Walking through the City you get a strong sense of history. Not only in obvious things like the Roman wall, the Wren churches, the underground rivers, the Thames bankside, Victorian alleyways, or in the Tudor drinking houses, but in the constant ever-evolving change of the present. Over the past 20 years Liz and I have seen many stone-fronted mid-C20th buildings being replaced by glass-fronted towers. At first we resented the change, but now we’ve come to admire it. And with that has come a deeper admiration for how the 9 plants of the 9 herb charm have survived 1,500 years in this space.

The Ruin is another Anglo-Saxon poem we featured in the film, which describes the former glory of an Roman city. It opens with the lines ‘This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it, courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.` These words feel contemporary to me, like something you might say of an abandoned shopping centre, and I think capture a sense of the timelessness of the City that we’ve come to love.

When I was young, my nan (Liz’s mum) took me to The Museum of London, before I ever lived in the area. I remember her telling me that when the Anglo Saxons settled here, they built their city Ludenwic west of Londinium, outside of the Roman walls (where Covent Garden now is). Historians are still puzzled as to why they refused the comfort and shelter of the Roman city with its houses, market-places, ports and its technologically advanced water and heating systems. I assumed that they were superstitious, and that their suspicions of this cursed ruin was shortsighted (they later came inside its walls for protection against the Vikings), but Liz questioned that judgement.

Maybe it was their confidence that directed their decision: that the Anglo-Saxons had a way of life that worked, (with the 9 herb charm at its centre) and didn’t need for Roman influence. “It would be like humans seeing how artificial intelligence lived”, she’d say, “we wouldn’t immediately think to use their technology, because we’d have more use of our own.”.

Reverse Perspectives, Pushkin House 2022